Tetronian comments on Alzheimer's vs Cryonics - Less Wrong

9 Post author: RobertLumley 26 August 2011 11:59PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 27 August 2011 06:54:25PM 1 point [-]

The thing is, suicide victims are always autopsied in the US (I saw that you attended the Houston meetup, so I'm going to assume you live in the States), which means you won't get frozen quickly enough (if at all). I suppose you could fake your suicide with something more subtle than poison, but now we're getting into questionable legal and ethical territory.

Comment author: gwern 20 April 2012 12:17:32AM 1 point [-]

I thought they were only autopsied if they did not take the option of slowly starving themselves to death under medical supervision?

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2012 01:05:13AM 1 point [-]

I've never heard of that before--do you know if doing that is actually legal?

Actually, though, my previous comment is wrong--there is no federal law mandating that all suicides be autopsied. I was misremembering what was stated in this book. Looking at it again, it actually says that suicides are almost always autopsied, but not 100% of the time. A quick Google search of some state legal codes seems to indicate that the autopsy requirement is actually determined at the state level, not at the federal level.

Comment author: gwern 20 April 2012 01:23:32AM 1 point [-]

I've never heard of that before--do you know if doing that is actually legal?

Such was my understanding from previous discussions.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2012 01:34:21AM 1 point [-]

Hmm. It's possible, given that the handful suicide cases I've found where autopsies weren't performed were cases in which the cause of death and intent to commit suicide were so blindingly obvious that an autopsy would just be a waste. (And, in many of them, a family remember requested that an autopsy not be performed.)

The bottom line is, I don't know much about the relevant laws or how medical supervision affects things. To get a definitive answer, you'd probably need to contact a cryonics provider, a doctor, or a lawyer.

Comment author: Vaniver 27 August 2011 10:07:36PM 0 points [-]

I do live in Texas, but I haven't been to the Houston meetup (yet). Like another poster, I don't expect the onset of those diseases anytime soon, and I think it likely that practices will change significantly in that time.

Comment author: jhuffman 29 August 2011 08:13:51PM 0 points [-]

You think medical examiners in Texas will stop performing autopsies of suicides and suspicious deaths in your lifetime? Do you have any evidence for that at all?

Comment author: Vaniver 30 August 2011 12:19:13PM 0 points [-]

Nope. It's unclear to me whether practices will change for the better or for the worse- but I can easily imagine a world where cryonics is widely accepted in ~50 years, or one where there's a jurisdiction you can quietly commit suicide in and then have your corpse flown out of, or that all cryonics organizations would have collapsed, and so the question is moot. Making a plan now is not a good use of my time because so much might change.